Around the corner from the main V&A London Design Festival hub, students at the Royal College of Art hosted a series of exhibitions at their South Kensington campus.
Sustain showcased sustainable objects, ecological thinking and solutions from across the art and design disciplines. Vehicle design student Robert Hagenstrom’s Bamboo Utility Vehicle, for instance, is both ecologically and socially sustainable. It promotes people in the developing world to generate... Read More

At the Grand Entrance to the Victoria & Albert Museum sits a giant installation cascading down the steps – the dramatic and soaring Timber Wave responding to the museum’s vast, ornamental and multilayered façade.
This is the work of London firm Amanda Levete Architects who, with the help of structural engineer Arup, has created this complex three-dimensional latticework spiral from American red oak, using lamination techniques normally practiced in furniture making,... Read More

With the lost glamour of air travel, holidaying by car can be rather fun – there is something idyllic about a road trip. Jack Kerouac captured the shear romance of it in On the Road – consumed, almost devoured in our innocent teens. The right car, off course, helps – one that somehow aesthetically complements the chosen route and enhances the driving pleasure of the trip.
This summer’s road trip saw us venture around northern France through Normandy, and our... Read More

A portable, retractable room divider has won the UK leg of the James Dyson Award. Designed by Michael Korn, KwickScreen helps healthcare professionals make the best use of their often limited available space – allowing for more privacy, dignity and protection to patients.
The student at London’s Royal College of Art has explored the use bistable materials such as slap on bracelets and tape measures. He developed early prototypes drawing on concepts found in nature, including... Read More

A composer and architect are creating urban ‘soundscapes’ around Lower Manhattan to explore the relationship between space and sound.
Organized by the Guggenheim Museum, To a Great City is the second edition of stillspotting nyc, a two-year multidisciplinary project that explores the relationship between space and silence within the crowded urban environment.
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Retro is an overused word these days. But unlike in the fashion industry where often the heady days of 60s Carnaby Street – or an era equally evocative – is replicated, retro within the car industry can mean something completely different. It essentially involves taking a design classic, an iconic car, and giving it a 21st century twist.
Thirteen years ago, Volkswagen lifted the veil off the new Beetle and so begun a whole new genre in car design. Since then, we’ve... Read More

observations

I attended an art and design foundation course much like the famous Vorkurs run by Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy, a year-long requirement for all new Bauhaus students before they could progress to study in a specific workshop. In a similar way to how the Bauhauslers ran the famous art school a century ago, mine was a place that taught experimentation and encouraged abstraction, tasking us to find our own unique solutions. And it happened to be the finest year of my formal education. The specialist art school that proceeded, failed entirely to capture my imagination, lacking the free spirit, the magical weirdness of that original school. So, I left my paints, clay, tools and camera, and took up writing.

As the Bauhaus celebrates 100, a series of publications aim to explore just how enduring the legacy of this modest art school founded in 1919 in the quiet town of Weimar. Some are assessing the impact of the Bauhaus post 1933, when the Nazis forced the final school in Berlin to close, as Bauhauslers emigrated to England and America and beyond. Others have re-published some of the original Bauhaus journals and documents. Together they tell a compelling story of the most famous school of design – a place of collective dialogues, progressive ideology, imagination and creative madness.